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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

IN 2008, A LIBERAL
Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge
congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W.
Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A
global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market
fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.
Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it's not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama's economic team.
You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully
should have expected from Obama's election. And you have to understand
two crucial things about American politics.

The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US
than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to
college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our
growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the
richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1
percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at
the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

How should academics respond to the death of Michael Brown and the
non-indictment of his killer? If you teach critical race theory,
criminology, modern American history, African-American studies, or any
number of other subjects explicitly linked to Brown’s death, then I
suspect you already have a plan. But what about the rest of us?
One of my beliefs about public engagement
is that the process of becoming an academic, as both a scholar and a
teacher, creates habits of mind that we can bring to bear on topics far
outside our subjects. Academe teaches us to be narrow, to state “that’s
not my field” when questioned. That caution, while understandable, has
contributed to the sense of isolation of academe from public discourse.
In moments like the reaction to Brown’s death, we need more engagement,
not less, and each of us has something to offer.

Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American
Universities, says that ideologically motivated and corporate-minded
trustees pose a great threat to public colleges. Mr. Rawlings, who leads
a group of elite research universities, was highly critical of a recent
effort to fire William C. Powers Jr., president of the University of
Texas at Austin. In 2012, Mr. Rawlings also admonished University of
Virginia board members for forcing out Teresa A. Sullivan as president,
only to reinstate her under public pressure. Both cases, Mr. Rawlings
says, point toward a troubling trend that has created instability at
some of the nation’s top academic institutions.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationNovember 24th, 2014When Kathryn J. Boor became a dean at Cornell University, change was at the center of her agenda from the very beginning.
She began leading the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in
2010, when the Ivy League institution—like colleges everywhere at the
time—was in the midst of streamlining operations and cutting costs. Just
four months into Ms. Boor’s tenure, the college announced
that its department of education would close. Cornell administrators
said they didn’t have the money it would take to raise the small
department’s national profile.
Since then, Ms. Boor has overseen a steady stream of change. In the
spring, for example, she grouped five departments to create the new
School of Integrative Plant Science, with the goal of showcasing the
university’s strengths in plant and soil sciences and attracting federal
grants, more students, and more top faculty.
"This took reorganizing people and getting people excited about a new
structure and a new way of thinking," says Ms. Boor, a food scientist.
"This is a way to ensure our pre-eminence five and 10 years down the
line."

Most of the new adjunct faculty unions affiliated with Service
Employee International Union’s national Adjunct Action campaign haven’t
yet achieved contracts. Those who have negotiated collective bargaining
agreements, however, say they have better pay and working conditions as a
result. Take adjuncts at Tufts University, for instance, whose newly inked contract guarantees significant pay increases, longer-term contracts and the right to be interviewed for full-time positions.
But can adjuncts elsewhere achieve similar gains without the help of
unions – or at least not through collective bargaining? Developments on
several campuses suggest that even when adjunct union drives fail, stall
or just loom, they can still exert pressure on institutions to improve
part-time faculty working conditions.
This summer, in a relatively rare loss for SEIU, adjuncts at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota voted down a proposed union.
Critics said they attributed the outcome to unconvincing union rhetoric
and personal pleas from their new president, Julie Sullivan, to give
her a chance to improve pay and working conditions without outside
interference.

Adjunct professors at two Vermont colleges have voted to form unions, according to a news release
from the Service Employees International Union. Adjuncts at Champlain
and Burlington Colleges have voted to be represented by the union, which
is in the midst of a national push to organize part-time faculty members.
Champlain adjuncts voted, 118 to 30, in favor of unionizing, while the vote among Burlington adjuncts was 23 to 4.

The University of Georgia is moving to fire a lecturer in its
psychology department after the administration found him to have
violated a policy barring professors from dating students under their
supervision, the Athens Banner-Herald reported.
The lecturer, Rich Suplita, admitted to violating the university’s
policy in 2012, when he dated an undergraduate he had met in one of his
classes. The student filed a harassment complaint against him, and he
received a reprimand.
He began dating a graduate teaching assistant in his summer class
this year. The couple reportedly met with a supervisor to ask about the
propriety of the relationship as it began, but the university determined
that Mr. Suplita had engaged in a “prohibited consensual relationship.”
Mr. Suplita has appealed a decision by the university’s
equal-opportunity office to the university’s president, Jere W.
Morehead. Mr. Suplita said he believed the inquiry into his conduct was
inconclusive, and he insisted he had not violated university policies.
But he said that he intended to leave the university no matter the
outcome of his case.

Monday, November 24, 2014

Employer unfair labor practices
(ULPs) are violations of worker and union rights under the National Labor
Relations Act (NLRA) and similar public sector collective bargaining laws. For
many unions, they are a familiar experience.

Some, however, have discovered that
a ULP can be a gift in disguise, providing a defense against the most dangerous
employer weapons. A union that plays its cards right can use ULPs to help win
contract campaigns, strikes, and other confrontations.

THREE
HEAVY BLOWS

Risks are always present during
union struggles. But the following scenarios are particularly threatening:

After a few bargaining sessions, the employer announces
that negotiations “have reached impasse” and that it will be carrying
out its final offer with substantial cuts to wages, benefits, and
other conditions of employment.

The union goes on strike. Within days or weeks, the
employer hires permanent replacements for striking workers...

Should students hear the "n-word," a slur for black people, in class?
And if a professor uses it and then apologizes, should that apology
feature multiple uses of the word?
These questions are being debated at the Mercer University Law
School, where black students are calling for the dismissal of a
professor, David Oedel, who used the word in his constitutional law
class -- without any need to do so, the students say.
Tiffany Watkins, a third-year student at the law school and president
of the Black Law Students Association, said the group was not ruling
out that there might be circumstances where there are pedagogical
reasons to use the word. But the reason to do so needs to be essential,
she said.
Oedel first used the word (according to his account and others) when
discussing the way justices of the Supreme Court viewed Thurgood
Marshall when he argued Brown v. Board of Education (as a
lawyer, before he joined the high court). Then, a few days later, Oedel
reportedly apologized to the class, but in doing so used the word
several more times (some reports say up to 10 times).

Pensacola State College faculty voted no confidence late last week in
their president, Edward Meadows. The union and the administration are
at an impasse in contract negotiations. The faculty cited five major
reasons, including a culture of reprisal, cronyism, disregard for the
terms of their contract, poor funding and attempting to prevent coverage of the labor dispute by the student newspaper.
"This vote was necessary to bring faculty concerns to the Board of
Trustees. Faculty have been discouraged from communicating with the
board since Dr. Meadows has been president," one professor said in a
statement released by the faculty union. The union said it was the first
time in the college's history that faculty have taken a no confidence
vote. According to the union, 133 of 193 full-time faculty took part in
the vote. Of those, 125 voted no confidence in Meadows.
The college’s trustees remain behind Meadows. “The Board of Trustees
of Pensacola State College has full confidence in President Meadows and
the college administration,” Herb Woll, the board chairman, said in a
statement released by the university.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant
recipients to make their research publicly available online -- a
multibillion-dollar boost to the open access movement.

The sweeping open access policy, which signals the
foundation’s full-throated approval for the public availability of
research, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and cover all new projects
made possible with funding from the foundation. The foundation will ease
grant recipients into the policy, allowing them to embargo their work
for 12 months, but come 2017, “All publications shall be available
immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.”

“We believe that our new open access policy is very much in
alignment with the open access movement which has gained momentum in
recent years, championed by the NIH, PLoS, Research Councils UK,
Wellcome Trust, the U.S. government and most recently the WHO,” a
spokeswoman for the foundation said in an email. “The publishing world
is changing rapidly as well, with many prestigious peer-reviewed
journals adopting services to support open access. We believe that now
is the right time to join the leading funding institutions by requiring
the open access publication of our funded research."

The University of Colorado at Boulder is paying an associate
professor of philosophy roughly $185,000 to resign after he was
investigated for potentially violating the college’s policy regarding
relationships with students, the Daily Camerareports.
Bradley Monton will receive $120,000 in addition to the rest of his
yearly salary in exchange for his resignation, according to a settlement agreement with the university, in which both parties denied fault or liability.
Mr. Monton has been a vocal critic of how the university has dealt
with allegations of sexism in its beleaguered philosophy department. An April report
by the American Association of University Professors said the college
had violated Mr. Monton’s academic freedom by removing him from certain
university committees, among other things.
The past year has been a nightmare
for Boulder’s philosophy department, which was the subject of an
outside report that last year found a culture of sexism within the
department. The college responded by removing the department chair and suspending graduate admissions, which it recently said it would resume.

At the turn of the 19th into the 20th
century, social theorists of an evolutionary bent were seeking to
describe the development of societies from the simpler to the more
complex. Émile Durkheim, for example, contrasted two major ways in which
societies could be held together: either by mechanical solidarity (the
likeness among component members) or by organic solidarity (a division
of labor that makes component members dependent upon one another).
Ferdinand Tönnies drew a distinction that has had a more nuanced history in the field of sociology, that between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Like "mechanical solidarity," the concept of Gemeinschaft points to what members of a society share, expressing it in a more positive way. Gesellschaft
refers to the more differentiated networks and interactions that
characterize a complex society. Tönnies suggested that a healthy society
needs both forms of connection to hold it together.Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft help illuminate
today’s college experience. To what extent are undergraduates moving
through overlapping though largely differentiated networks, and to what
extent do they share experiences, priorities, and goals?

When, in 1942, Lionel Trilling remarked,
"What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us," he suggested a
great deal in a dozen words. Ideas were not only higher forms of
existence, they, like the gods, could be invoked and brandished in one’s
cause. And, like the gods, they could mess with us. In the last
century, Marxism, Freudianism, alienation, symbolism, modernism,
existentialism, nihilism, deconstruction, and postcolonialism enflamed
the very air that bookish people breathed. To one degree or another,
they lit up, as Trilling put it, "the dark and bloody crossroads where
literature and politics meet."
Trilling belonged to a culture dominated by New York Intellectuals,
French writers, and British critics and philosophers, most of whom had
been marked by the Second World War and the charged political atmosphere
of the burgeoning Cold War. Nothing seemed more crucial than weighing
the importance of individual freedom against the importance of the
collective good, or of deciding which books best reflected the social
consciousness of an age when intellectual choices could mean life or
death. And because of this overarching concern, the interpretation of
poetry, fiction, history, and philosophy wasn’t just an exercise in
analysis but testified to one’s moral view of the world.

The first letter was dated June 19, 1970. "Dear Mrs. Eliot," it began.
The recipient was Valerie Eliot, widow of T.S. Eliot. The writer was
Ronald Schuchard, a young literature scholar. "I have been researching
Mr. Eliot’s lesser known writings for over three years," he wrote, "and I
have written a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation on my
findings."
He asked for permission to read some of Eliot’s unpublished writing,
permission that could be granted only by Mrs. Eliot, who controlled the
estate.
So commenced a correspondence, and eventually a friendship, between
an extremely patient academic and a woman known for fiercely
protecting—some might say overprotecting—the papers of the revered poet
who ushered in High Modernism.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Slate Magazine November 21st, 2014
This week, academia is in a frenzy—well, an erudite tizzy—over an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education
by recently retired art professor Laurie Fendrich. In the piece,
Fendrich, who’s 66, lauds her own decision to leave her position at
Hofstra—and characterizes her aging colleagues as doddering dinosaurs
who are clogging up the academic pipeline.
As in other professions, baby boomers “hanging on” past retirement age is a hot-button issue in higher education—and it’s easy to see why. In the university, the over-65s are the final generation
for whom teaching college has provided a stable, (somewhat) respected,
remunerative middle-class existence. They’ve had benefits and job
security for longer than most of their younger colleagues have been
alive. And they didn’t have to work nearly as hard to get all that—back
in the ’60s and ’70s, when most of them began their careers,
requirements for hiring and tenure were a fraction of what they are now.
(It was also legal to stipulate that your department wanted a “male between 25 & 45,” so the good old days are a matter of perspective.)

In my five years organizing with
non-union health care workers who wanted to join the union, job security was
always one of their top issues.

Firings were arbitrary, they said.
Evaluations were based on favoritism. Experienced employees were fired just
because they were more expensive.

So it always surprises me to hear
regular people repeat the smears against teachers’ job security. They’re
parroting the message of those trying to weaken one of the largest remaining
sectors of unionized workers in this country.

When it comes to teachers’ right to
job security, you have to look at why management wants to get rid of it—if you
want to tell fact from fiction. A few common myths...

n
my five years organizing with non-union health care workers who wanted
to join the union, job security was always one of their top issues.
Firings were arbitrary, they said. Evaluations were based on
favoritism. Experienced employees were fired just because they were more
expensive.
So it always surprises me to hear regular people repeat the smears
against teachers’ job security. They’re parroting the message of those
trying to weaken one of the largest remaining sectors of unionized
workers in this country.
When it comes to teachers’ right to job security, you have to look at
why management wants to get rid of it—if you want to tell fact from
fiction. A few common myths:
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2014/11/three-myths-teacher-tenure#sthash.FbbwIyPa.dpuf

n
my five years organizing with non-union health care workers who wanted
to join the union, job security was always one of their top issues.
Firings were arbitrary, they said. Evaluations were based on
favoritism. Experienced employees were fired just because they were more
expensive.
So it always surprises me to hear regular people repeat the smears
against teachers’ job security. They’re parroting the message of those
trying to weaken one of the largest remaining sectors of unionized
workers in this country.
When it comes to teachers’ right to job security, you have to look at
why management wants to get rid of it—if you want to tell fact from
fiction. A few common myths:
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2014/11/three-myths-teacher-tenure#sthash.FbbwIyPa.dpuf

The Chronicle of Higher EducationNovember 21st, 2014
With tensions between Israelis and Palestinians escalating after this
week’s terrorist attack on a Jerusalem synagogue, one scholarly group,
the Middle East Studies Association, appears unlikely to escape conflict
anytime soon.
Yet, after a year in which many of its members have been publicly
accused of anti-Israel bias or even outright anti-Semitism, the group,
known as Mesa, is not showing any signs of shying away from controversy.
In addition to having published strongly worded attacks on its members’
accusers and lodged protests against Israel’s shelling of Palestinian
educational institutions, the association plans to wade right into
hot-button debates related to Israel at its annual conference, which
begins here on Saturday.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Inside Higher EdNovember 20th, 2014
Routine. Predictable. Orderly. They’re fine words, ones that convey a
certain level of familiarity and comfort. But they don’t describe the
ideal learning environment, at least, not for the four professors
recognized today as some of the best college instructors in the country.
These veteran teachers of engineering, writing and paleontology opt
for words like playful, flexible, even chaotic. There’s noise and
movement. A rhythm that has taken years to refine.
The recipients of the 2014 U.S. Professors of the Year award are
recognized for their success in teaching and commitment to working with
undergraduate students.
“These forward-thinking instructors advocate learning by doing,
putting their students in the driver’s seat of their own development,”
said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and
Support of Education (CASE).

An official at the National Labor Relations Board has called for the
agency to toss out the results of an unsuccessful vote to unionize
adjunct instructors at Marist College after concluding that the election
had been tainted by the college’s interference and by ballots wrongly
cast by administrative employees.
Thomas A. Miller, a regional NLRB hearing officer, said in a report
released on Monday that illegal actions by the private college, in
Poughkeepsie, N.Y., justified disallowing the narrow vote against
unionization that had resulted. He said the college’s administration had
interfered in the process just before ballots were cast last June by
offering adjuncts pay raises, proposing the establishment of a faculty
committee on adjunct issues in lieu of a union, and enforcing a
faculty-email policy in an inconsistent manner to put the union
organizers at a disadvantage.

Patricia H. Kelley is standing in a lecture hall at the University of
North Carolina at Wilmington with a blanket fastened to her body.
Well, standing might not be the best word. She’s flapping her arms, pretending to fly.
Ms. Kelley, a geology professor, lives to teach about plants and
animals long since dead. And on this day, she’s teaching, with the use
of a blanket harnessed to her body, about how the pterodactyl’s wing
membranes might have worked.
Ms. Kelley’s also been known to lie on her desk with a student
holding a lollipop out in front of her head as this teacher of 35 years
lunges for the candy to show students how prehistoric fish might have
lunged onto land for the first time.

Fill in the blank: Faculty members and the leadership of _____
state-college system are at odds over a proposal that aims to streamline
how the institutions work, to save money, and to improve student
performance through technology and administrative cooperation.
That story is playing out in several states in the Northeast and
Midwest, where falling enrollments and shrinking state dollars are
putting an especially tight squeeze on regional colleges. In contrast to
public flagships, the regional institutions have two strikes against
them: They largely serve a place-bound student body, and they lack the
prestige to build big endowments or research portfolios.
The most recent example was in Connecticut, where faculty members at
both two- and four-year institutions in the Connecticut State Colleges
and Universities system have revolted against a plan that calls for
enhancing online learning, aligning courses with the state’s work-force
needs, and sharing some administrative functions.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Senior faculty. It sounds like an honorific. It isn’t. It’s more a
sort of stigmata. Being called “senior faculty” stigmatizes you. I’m
called “senior faculty” quite a lot.
I have been teaching journalism for 33 years, 29 at the same college.
My career in academe, begun with innocent hopes and fearsome ambitions,
is nearing its obvious end. I expect to be bid farewell in the style to
which I have been made accustomed. Notable work anniversaries—10, 15,
20, 25 years—all passed unacknowledged by my institution.
Are there benefits to being senior faculty? Of course, there are. The
exhausting struggle for tenure, and later for promotions, are far
behind me. I can remember feeling anxious and driven all the time. Now I
just feel anxious occasionally.
Although not about teaching. No. Never about teaching.

Perks are fewer and farther between for faculty members these days,
especially those teaching at public institutions. But they can still
expect the basics, such as somebody else emptying their trash cans at
the end of the day, right? Not any more, at least not at West Virginia
University. The institution recently announced that faculty members must
begin taking out their own garbage, in order to encourage recycling.
But some professors object to the measure and its premise, saying that
the move is more about conserving the bottom line than the environment,
and that the new policy comes at the expense of faculty morale.
“The primary issue is that we’re not talking about the real issue,”
said Hawley Montgomery-Downs, an associate professor of psychology at
West Virginia who has been a vocal opponent of the new trash duty.
“What’s really going on is budget cuts, carried out in these decisions
of which the faculty is unilaterally informed.”

Inside Higher EdNovember 18th, 2014
This post is the first in a four-part series on MOOC research at
Davidson College. We begin with the rationale for our research design
and will follow with posts about our planning process, implementation
and results.
This past spring I had the privilege of talking with Fiona Hollands,
Associate Director and a Senior Researcher at the Center for
Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, Columbia
University. She and Devayani Tirthali published a cost-benefit study of MOOC experiments
that is a must-read for college administrators overseeing existing or
future MOOC initiatives. Two leading goals for the 29 institutions
interviewed include expanding access to higher education and improving economics through lowered costs or increased revenues. The Columbia team’s research suggests, however, that the likelihood MOOCs will achieve either of these goals is unclear.

A new SEIU/Adjunct Action report released today called Crisis at the Boiling Point tells
an important story of what’s happening in academic labor by documenting
and analyzing just how much work part-time faculty are doing, when they
are doing it for free and how federal employment laws often fail to
protect the contingent workforce. This report also offers
recommendations and actions that faculty, students and concerned members
of the community can take to begin to reclaim our higher education
system.
Faculty from 238 colleges and universities completed the
national survey. Respondents include faculty teaching at every type of
degree-granting institution: non-profit, state universities, community
colleges and for-profit colleges and universities, both faculty teaching
on physical campuses and at on-line institutions. Faculty responded to
the national survey from 32 states with the highest percentages coming
from Massachusetts (20 percent), New York (14 percent), and California
(14 percent). In addition, to date, over 40 in-depth interviews have
been completed with faculty to gather detailed data on working
conditions.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationNovember 18th, 2014
Steven G. Salaita, the scholar who saw the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign revoke his job offer
after he made harsh criticisms of Israel on social media, has filed a
lawsuit accusing the university of violating the state’s open-records
law, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Mr. Salaita became the public face of a debate about academic freedom
after the university rescinded an offer of a tenured professorship in
its program in American Indian studies. Many scholars criticized the
university’s handling of his case, and Mr. Salaita vowed to wage a legal
fight if he was not reinstated.
Mr. Salaita’s complaint seeks to force the university to turn over
emails related to his aborted job offer, asserting that the university
had responded improperly to a request made under the state’s
open-records law.

Most tenure-track and tenured
faculty have tremendous empathy for the plight of adjuncts. Aside from a few “lifeboaters” here and there, the prevailing
attitude in the academy is a self-aware and very correct “there but for the
grace of [favorite deity], go I.”

But when it comes to concrete
measures to improve academic labor conditions, many ladder faculty still feel,
and not without reason, like their hands are tied. Say, for example, that your
department wanted to take a stand and refuse to depend on underpaid part-timers
to “cover classes.” The administration could smirkingly take half your courses
off the books, and then use “under enrollment” as an excuse to shutter your
whole department.